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It's been bad for a while but man it seems like it's getting worse lately. The amount of lazy asset flips of nothing more than some stock tutorial code and store assets from unity/unreal is incredible...but what's worse is they're ALL getting greenlit!  There's paid greenlight booster services that have been around for a while now that valve seems to be doing absolutely nothing about, causing games that couldn't have taken more than 15 minutes to make to rocket up and get greenlit almost immediately while the honest developers sometimes take weeks.

If that nonsense isn't bad enough, there's games barely in the CONCEPT stage getting greenlit, where there's no actual game yet, it seems all you really have to do to get 90% of the people on steam to vote it up is label it "open world, survival, and early access"

I've always liked digging through new indie releases to try to find the hidden gems but man oh man, it seems like this year that layer of bullshit you have to dig through to find the decent games is just 10x as thick as it was last year...and trying to find a decent vr game is...oh man...99/100 vr games on steam right now are "stand in one spot shooting and endless wave of zombies/aliens/warriors/etc"

dont worry, those russian dudes generally dont break 1000 copies and they are doomed to live the life in the country of institutionalized despair.
vr games are the victims of "this is the new iphone, get in the bubble" hype, so ive seen a lot of rando people coming from a woodwork with vr startups so youll also see a lot of cynical trash from them and china. I saw comparable amounts of AR startup when this was a thing.

The inevitable crashing and burning isn't quite the point; they're still clogging up the pipeline, making it even harder for the real gems to be noticed in the first place.

real gem gonna get noticed
i think bad greenlight products are in minority compared to just mediocre/ok ones

I actually posted a write up last week about how I thought people could improve their Greenlight submissions because I felt the same frustration after participating in it for the last few years. I still love it, but it seems like it's going downhill.

Here's the link to the post if you're interested - https://redd.it/5qd8e1 (https://redd.it/5qd8e1)

Sturgeon's law

Actually, I feel like I've been seeing both worse shit and better stuff on greenlight lately. Mastema Out Of Hell looks interesting, at LEAST average, Immortal Redneck looks like a decent Painkiller/Ziggurat pastiche from a small studio, I like the look of Riptale even if it's humble, I'm just thankful we're out of the Goat Simulator, BMC Studios, Digital Homicide woods.

But those Russian games haven't gone away yet. Anyone remember that meme game that got greenlit?

I totally agree with you.
It's also frustrating seeing the front store page filled with AAA titles. People who know about Call of Duties Zombies, for example, can search for it IMO, they don't need to be told about it constantly. If that space was available for indie hits.. like, once you've sold 10k copies you stop appearing on the front page after a week and let word of mouth do the rest..

steam is rent-seeking bullshit garbage with an extremely problematic monopoly status and has no place in an efficient system of distribution, hope this is helpful

100%. I'm excited to see Itch.io but a lot of stuff on there is very amateur (same with Steam now).

Steam has the promise of curation but how would I even begin? I think a game store could do well like this -- have a few people on staff who play the games. Then they recommend certain games and only publish those through their store. Like Nintendo used to be only publishing quality games. Then you go to that site and say, every 6 months they release a new game, you know it's quality.

the front page is actually mostly generated by your preferences and buying history, with the weekend/weekday deals up top.

But seriously, i think a few of you missed my point. I've travel a LOT for work and often go through greenlight for fun, over the past few months the "crap" entries, which most are just unity,unreal,or cryengine with some stock or tutorial code and some bought assets pawned off as either a "horror" or "survival" game, or RPG maker games with a few stock assets, have gone from about 20% to about 80% of the entries. What's worse, i come back a week later, and 99% of the crap entries i reviewed GET GREENLIT, the only ones that don't are ones with blatantly stolen assets that got reported.  Not only are they getting greenlit most of them get greenlit in a span of only a few days. The greenlight voting groups have basicly rigged the system, if someone is signed up for them their entry, whether it be a functional game or not, is pretty guaranteed to be greenlit very quickly, meanwhile fantastic games that really do deserve greenlight tend to take weeks.

A few of the recent gems i've seem spam voted up to the top are a black and white platformer with no sound and a square as the main character, basicly the stencyl starter game with no art, The Cryengine 5 survival game starter kit with no changes whatsoever, just compiled and given a name and a list of "planned features for the future".  And my personal favorite the gorilla.bas clone with no sound and simpler levels.

Now when they do release they get pretty quickly voted into oblivion but not until after a bunch of people buy it and get stuck with it. (and the steam refund option really isn't obvious to most people, a lot of people don't even know it exists)  The greenlight spam groups even trade free keys for the release so when it comes out they spam positive reviews for the first few days.  Browsing indie games in particular is extremely hard on steam as it's just page after page of overwhelmingly negative reviewed games and you really have to dig to find stuff worth playing. (it doesn't help that steam's filtering and search sucks, so if you sort by reviews you can't sub-sort by anything else)

to the two replies that came in while i was typing my last post, there is a better distributer, GOG, and they actually review everything before putting it up.  I always use GOG galaxy when possible but not enough of the more quality indie games submit to them.  It's a two part problem, you can't have customers fully in charge or they'll just rig the system like on steam, but the company reviewing every game makes releases super slow and a lot of smaller but still good games get left out.  Almost need a two part, steam like customer voting with a final company approval

Ok, what about those damn pop ups?

Sounds like a better thing, for sure. They don't look "indie" though

Clicking on Games I see The Witcher, SimCity, Freespace, Might & Magic, D&D... where are the quality curated indie games? People like Smestorp & Cactus & Foddy & Increpare churning out fantastic games on their sites.. I want people like that all in one site

click the category "indie" lol

https://www.gog.com/games/indie

they have a whole indie vetting process, i wish they advertised it a bit more
https://www.gog.com/indie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVfeK7SupIc

Actual text from the #2 "recent submission" greenlight video:

"After the release of the game you'll see more well designed heroes and monsters!"
... "Possible graphic improvement!"

Now that everybody can make a game.. everybody's making a game :(

From a game consumer perspective, i never had any trouble finding the little gems hiding in steam because when a game is good, you'd end up hearing about it. I dont consider myself as a heavy player , but i regularely buy indie games from following devlogs here, or looking at activities from friendlist since i befriended people who like to play indie games.
And so far, i can understand the illusion of being overwhelmed by the amount of shitty indie games, but in the end, after checking every steam sales in the past 2 years. I'm more tempted to say that i still crave for quality indie games.
bad Steam greenlighted games don't stand a chance and barely manage to sell +1k copie, and it's easy to be fooled by their performance in steamspy because of giveaways.

From a dev perspective, it's indeed scary because it feels like you have to compete against all that.

But if you're afraid of those games, maybe you should reconsider your product, your skills.

"Now that everybody can make a game.. everybody's making a game"   you are part of that everybody...

it can't be mentioned often enough that if steam went back to their pre greenlight curation model, 90+% of the people on this website would never get a game on steam. and because steam has a near-monopoly on pc game sales, it'd make it almost impossible to sell anything at all on pc unless you have *connections* or manage to find a publisher (such as microsoft, lots of the pre-greenlight indie games on steam were xbla ports).

Simply put, Valve being in the market position they are in can't curate too strictly because it'd ruin a ton of people's livelihoods. Their position also requires them to cater to a wide and diverse audience. A lot of the steam games people claim are "low quality", like hidden object games or various other casual games, simply appeal to a different audience than "core" gamers.

That's also why GOG comparisons don't make sense. GOG is tiny compared to Steam and profits using a "boutique" approach, where they cater to a particular demographic (hardcore pc nerds) and stick to that. They can not only afford to curate because of this, they need to curate because it's their whole raison d'etre.

Great points.
Bakkusa, I welcome the challenge of indie game development. I'd rather be outsold by superior games than (subjectively) inferior eg. unity asset survival sim clones. This is my personal feeling on the matter and I'm sure there is a tangled hierarchy of indie devs who think their games are better than another devs with conflicting views from dev to dev.

My main peeves about Steam, as the "de facto indie game store" as multiple successful developers have pointed out are AAA games (which do enough marketing & have enough word of mouth to, IMO, not need any presence at all just let users search for it or re-direct from call of duty.com to a steam page) and low quality indie games.

I've found games through tigsource, twitter & friends too. There have also been times when I've opened up the Steam search and found nothing interesting, or opened Greenlight and put "not interested" on 10 games in a row because nothing looks fun or innovative. These negative experiences lead me away from browsing Steam (and possibly discovering a gem!).

Silbereisen, good points. Are there other boutique game stores? Eg. a one-stop-shop for quality roguelikes, or SHMUPS or puzzles or what have you? I see this kind of thing on a developer by developer basis but have yet to find an aggregate store.

One of the Greenlight games I saw yesterday had comments about "30 minute game.. but free achievements!" like it was a good thing :(.

Thats a good thing for some people, just like cards.
Last week i saw a guy on gamedev.ru making an achievement constructor.

Do you think those games belong on Steam?

why do people care about steam achievements

in a cold and uncaring universe we all need something to hold onto. for some people it's god, for some it's a sense of justice, for others it's their children.
for a certain easily predicted demographic, it's steam achievements showing they completed a game a while dragging a specific physics object from the first level all the way to the end

i could kind of understand it if they at least derived a sense of pride from doing something difficult, even if it's just in a videogame. i can even sort of understand people going for these trading cards because at least can be sold for money.

but valuing a game because it has "easy achievements" just makes fuck all sense to me. as in, i literally do not understand why anyone would care about that ever or derive any sense of satisfaction from it.

I thought Steam was a videogame entertainment store not therapy

a better way to look at it is as a means of terror management

Yes, if it gets through.
I kinda start to admire Valve efforts at designing autonomous market space that can moderate itself and choose what is and isnt in demand.
I was once owertaken by "videogames gonna be ruined, bad people gonna get money" anxiety, but now im over it because one time profit and sustainable, scalable business are two different things it seems.

dont achievments affect a player level on steam? i think that might allow ghost accounts to have some pseudo reputation

I was gonna make this its own thread, but since there are a lot of heated opinions here...

Apparently Steam is getting rid of it entirely. They're replacing it with something called Steam Direct?

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/02/10/valve-to-abolish-steam-greenlight-open-up-with-steam-direct/

oh, so they're planning to use essentially the same model apple uses for the ios appstore?

WELP

Not quite. Apple, despite lack of quality filters, does have reviewers open the app and check for immediate crashes.

Steam Direct has a $100-$5000 deposit per game (Valve has undecided on the amount) to publish.

Bigger fee may help, $100 is affordable for 12yo from Moldova, maybe itll cut people submitting their first unity project.
Upfront paperwork info filling is also good, on Gamedev ru i saw a lot of devs with released steam games asking what is a tax and how to get money from steam.
Voting removal also may remove booster bots and shady "publishers".

It all basically depends on a fee. 300-500-700 bucks seems reasonable, more than 1000 may disadvantage people from non-EU, non-Usa territories, 5000 gonna plunge everything back at 2009.

That's a good thing in my opinion.

$100 with no curation is much worse.
$500-$1000 is a sweet spot imo
$5000 sends us back to ~2012 Steam, but all the crappy games are still there.

This sounds a bit ruthless, but there should be some type of purge system from Steam.
If your game gets as certain threshold of negative reviews and/or has low sales, remove it.

Really though the primary issue is lack of discoverability for indie games.
Valve slightly improved this with the custom store fronts, but their algorithms are bad.
Personally I keep seeing zombie/survival games when I'm interested in experimental indie titles.

Greenlight has always been awful. But hopefully they actually make a system which is better.
It's a lose-lose situation for Valve, though. The damage has already been done.

Also: a high fee means there will be more predatory indie publishers.
'We will pay your fee but take a dumb amount of revenue from you.'

Stifles innovation.

:(

I didn't really use steam during the 2009-2012 times...what were the issues before Greenlight came on the scene?

games were limited to AAA titles (initially just valve titles) and a handful of "big name" indie gams that were mostly ported over from XBLA.

thats the worst idea ive ever

Then you could "bot" your "enemies" out of the store and create a monopoly for your game idea.

I didn't even think of that. Actually yea, it is a pretty awful idea.

There's no easy solution really.

metagame

Hurry up guys if you have games to submit.

gah, i'm so stressed right now as i'll have to rush making a trailer and some footage.

Ship malware with your game to create a botnet and take out competitors.

Also every game with day 1 server crash and bugs would get thrown out immediately.

This could be a post in the "Pitch your game topic" thread: ;)

Metagame: Ship malware with your game to create a botnet and take out competitors.

Or you could make a game that addicts every other game developer to your game.. and then they won't have time to make games! Minecraft 2.0!

Btw that botnet strategy works in real life, the Mirari botnet creator is actively killing other botnets designed to kill their botnet https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/annasenpaichat.txt (https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/annasenpaichat.txt) . Funnily enough, one of their major clients is a "top 5 Minecraft server", DDoSing the competition

So, as someone who has released multiple well-reviewed but poor-selling games on Steam, here's my perspective:

Putting a fee in front of releasing a game onto Steam is going to do a lot more harm than good.  If it's closer to 100 dollars, that's not going to be much of a barrier of entry for spam games, shovelware, ect (in fact, I'd say it would be a lower barrier of entry for that sort of thing than Greenlight)... I'll still be able to release games onto Steam, although the fee will sting a bit, but it will disproportionately effect people from poorer countries.

If the fee is in the thousands, it pretty much kills Steam as a viable platform for small indies.  It makes it a very real possibility to spend a year on a project, have it come out, be well reviewed, and actually lose money on it.  And the problem is, because Steam has such a monopoly on the market, it's a massive uphill battle to get your game in front of an audience if it's not on Steam.  Even a failure on Steam gets more of an audience than releasing most other places.  Sure, it would get rid of a lot of the schlock that you probably ignore anyway, but it would also kill a lot of the vibrancy of indie games that are currently available on the platform.

Now, from a consumer perspective, I've never understood the mentality behind keeping Steam as a walled garden.  Like, what harm does it do me if I can buy a shitty game if I want to. 

I think the big problem is discoverability, and that has very little to do with how many games are available.

So 40% of steam games came out in 2016?  That amounted to a little over 4,000 games.  Amazon sells 480 million products, and somehow does a better job at recommending me things than Steam.

Steam should really clean up their front page and make it more in line with Amazon or Netflix in how it recommends content to users.  It should basically go: "Recommended for you" followed by a horizontal scrollable bar of games, then "Genre you like" followed by horizontal scrollable bar of games then "New Releases" followed by a horizontal scrollable bar of games... and so on.  The front page is so cluttered right now and has such inefficient use of space.

yes thank you for expressing my thoughts better than i could.

I live in a country where monthly salary is $60-$100 if youre lucky and gamedev is like $1000 if youre lucky to be employed fulltime in office, but i would not mind bigger fee. In fact majority of local devs i see on sites are pro $1000 fee. Maybe there is some poorer countries that would not like that, but  <1 kbs internet and computor already required for steam publishing. People dont even buy steam games that much in 2nd world and 3rd world countries, its all f2p, mobile and piracy.
Devs here know thats if $1000 is impossible money for you, get out of the kitchen. And theres entire thing about IT and art-design being more stable and profitable, so high risk and unfair investment is something you should take as granted.
Although anglosphere videogame blogger discourse has already decided that $100 is too much in 2012. Go Itch.io, inclusive space that has no regional pricing and requires like 20 mbs internet and 16 gb ram to be in your browser.

They also told that fee is "recoupable", no one knows what it means yet.

A small fee might be enough to keep the submission pipeline not overstressed. Knowing Valve at this point, I think that's really all there is to it. The intention is not to keep "bad games" away from the store (their recent approval history clearly shows they don't want to make a guess what game is good or not), just limit the amount of games that are submitted at once. If I had to make a guess, the fee will be something between 100-500 Dollar.

Not rejecting your criticism (tho the 16 GB RAM statement is def hyperbolic), but I would recommend reaching out the itch.io team about this (https://itch.io/support or their Twitter). I'm sure they would do something about it.

Maybe i should try, disabling gif prewievs should be a frontpage button, regional pricing i guess is off-limits because creator sets up the price and i dont think anyone there wants to engage in local taxes and stuff.
Although that seems to be a common problem from Bay area originated sites for me, they work like SHIT.

On a side note Bay area tech mentality should be combatted, those guys think that arduino is some sort of widely available shit for poor people and average gamer can assemble their own Turbografx if they want to play Ankuku Densetsu cart they bought in Akihabara.

Nuke or otherwise completely annihilate silicon valley imho

Let's stay on topic, tigsourcers.

no

Ugh, too tired to work anymore... Let's read tigs-- :/

After emerging as a de facto monopoly, I think it's incumbent on Steam to open their gates wide. If that's the service they want to be, then they don't have a business turning anyone away - it should be up their customers to decide whether to buy or not. Which is hard for me to say, because I super-liked the walled garden that Steam used to be, but that was in a world where I could still get physical games at a real store.
I'm not even sure about the fee thing. Something I keep being repeated (though not here) is that indies should go through kickstarter in order to raise the money to position their product to sell? Like, wat a hell, really? What about folks who can't or don't want to deal with kickstarter for a number of reasons?

Anyway, I think the problem is, like Silbereisen said, discoverability - and it's not just indies. Since TB semi-retired for health reasons, I don't have a "daily" review show or site I turn to, and I'm largely unaware of recent releases unless they go super super big. I don't even know that discoverability is Steam's problem. Youtube seems like the natural place to advertise, but auto manufacturers and so on seem to have raised the bar on ad costs to something that barely even big companies are willing to pay.

A storefront that's less clunky and more navigable like Netflix's would be a start, I guess. I feel like what I really I want is a tiering system, sort developers by team size and quantity of releases, perfectly quantifiable numbers that are not subject to opinion, but I don't know if that kind of sort method would be useful to anyone who doesn't know a bit about the industry. Maybe just more data about the developers? It would also permit easy cross-sales if a developer catches someone's eye. Anyway. Rambling on, I am.

Let's not make the mistake of thinking "higher fees = quality control." It doesn't.

Hopefully I'm not misrepresenting this, but I read a comment on some article about how essentially its not Steam's job to do quality control; they are a distribution platform. To that, I call total bull. That's like saying the grocery store doesn't have to concern themselves with the quality of their produce and food. They distribute it and that's all that matters, which I'm sure most of us would agree that that's complete bologne. But until something like itch.io really takes off and contests with Steam for a piece of the digital distribution pie, Steam can pretty much be whatever it wants. In fact, one might argue that its high volume of games could be its biggest plus from a business perspective: it has more than enough games in its catalog to push some darlings to the top so that the illusion of "quality control" is still in place, for whatever that's worth.

But for all of this, I think its just becoming more and more clear at this point that there is no magic wand that gets our indie games noticed. The elite status of indie title releases has long since disappeared, and the bare minimum of getting on Steam just isn't going to cut it anymore. In the same vein as what I started with, I'm not sure "quality control = better discoverability" is a particularly strong tactic to bank on either.

the fact remains that without steam's earlier "quality control" of only letting AAA titles and high profile indies in it's become 1000 times easier to sell an indie game on pc. for the overwhelming majority of released indie games, discoverability is immeasurably better than it would have been in, say, 2010.

repeating myself here, but going back to terrible gatekeepers like the IGF and an "all or nothing" model where youre either one of the chosen few who get on steam or never sell anything is NOT something most devs posting in this thread actually want.

Ah, I was waiting for "steam owes QA to everyone" with carefully prepared rant.
Old style control is 2009, fulltime valve greenlight QA staff would be much inferior to general voting.
They would need to be 100% zen game trend specialists who are tasked with judging and turning down unknown projects in a total vacuum of opinions. "Trash game" is not really measurable metric. Is Rust bad survival game? Is Undertale rpg maker trash? Is FNAF bad Slenderman screamcam game?
Not mention in alternate universe same people would be upset with same power, but this time they would spin "sjw bias" narrative with some rejected devs pandering to that while other side would write article after article about steam letting in "problematic" games.

?

I'm not saying Steam needs an internal review system to play through entire games, but expecting a simple fee to cut down on the "noise," as they put it, probably isn't going to pan out nearly as well as one might think. Pertaining to quality control, certainly there's a happy middle ground that could be found, right?

i was jumping off from that grocery store analogy, i guess my rant is not pointed directly at you as much as it is at all people who cry for moderation on tweeter and their cozy articles

That's one of them Jim Sterling false metaphors. One, a grocery store is interested in quality control because they have competition, and two, they have shelf space constraints.

Again, because Steam is a de facto monopoly, they have a duty not to be terribly critical, in much the same way that Microsoft shouldn't be walling off their OS to select developers. Why do consoles get away with it? Because they're deliberately marketed as children's/teen's toys, not multi-use workstations.

A high fee would be good for publishers, that one is for sure.

You omitted the second half of my paragraph, where I essentially said "but" followed by what you just said. ::)

note for people who ranted about devs who used to publish games on greenlight and rely on trade cards sales.

you only get 10% of what cards generate.

you understand that most market leaders in their fields can afford to do this, right? you understand that steam is the wealthiest games distributor (possibly like, digital content distributor period) in the world, right? The only reason valve doesn't do this is because they don't have credible competition. It's a basic service that can and should be expected from large distributors.

i think that's his point.........

My impressions was that it didn't have to do with the actual trade card revenue. It was simply the fact that it makes the game a profitable target for the card farmers, thus driving sales.

This is why I think, given time, something like itch.io could continue gaining traction and eventually force better market practices. Unlikely? Maybe, but still a possibility.

Realize, of course, that by "time" I'm talking several years.

I don't think it's quite as cut-and-dry as you are making it out to be. I also don't think Valve deserves a free pass on this issue. I can understand and appreciate why Valve handles this issue the way they have been handling it. I also know that Valve knows what the more optimal solution is, and avoids that solution because it doesn't line their pockets with filthy lucre.

Valve could establish a human-supported approvals team. It would require a fairly large team, and one specifically trained to peruse and evaluate submitted game titles. An effective team of this type would require critical judgement, solid communication skills, a decent amount of technical expertise, and a LOT of patience. Given the sheer workload we would be talking about, I'm thinking they would have to start it off at 30 heads minimum, probably scaling it up to double or triple that initial number. And this team would have to be specialized, full-time staff. 40-hour work week minimum.

Since you can't just hire interns for this sort of work, we're talking somewhere on the order of 50K annual starting salary for such a team, probably bumping up into the 60-70k area for the more experienced members. And this is just assuming that the team is not located in an expensive area. If they're located in places like California or Seattle, you can just bump those figures up by around 20-30k. So, we're looking at a one and a half million dollar per year continuing expense for the bare minimum team, scaling up to around three and a half million after you flesh the team out to handle more submissions.

I'm not saying Valve can't handle such an expense, but you can see why they would be more eager to pursue other solutions. Those figures are pure expense, no guaranteed return on investment. And they're recurring. You have to continue paying those salaries and benefits year after year. When you design an automated community-driven system like Greenlight, it costs next to nothing to keep that going. When you scrap Greenlight and replace it with Steam Direct, you get to line the company coffers with submission fees that Valve may or may not have to pay back. That approach actually has the chance of making the company more money.

Valve's motivations in this matter are extremely mercenary. They're making these choices because they are a business, and they want to make their accountants happy. When accountants see revenue increases, they get happy. When they see recurring expenses that don't boost sales they get sad. It's not the best solution for developers, and it's not the best solution for players. But you can easily understand why it might be seen as the best solution for Valve.

I agree with your analysis -- but I don't see how that's anything but cut and dry.

The most profitable company per person in america, probably the world, wants to save a tiny fraction of its money because there's no pressure on them from either competitors or their clients to do better. It's not seen as the best solution for obvious reasons: the people it benefits have no leverage.

Yeah, it just kinda reinforcing the point. There IS a better way to do it that's well within Valve's power to do. But since there's no competing force making it a necessity, why bother? And believe it or not, I have a feeling 3 million dollars a year is pocket change for Valve and companies making far less spend far more on staffing.

We just have to come to grips with the fact that, bottom line, Valve's interest in being our "friend" is very one-dimensional.

Digital homicide and similar devs sent free keys for cards. Card farmers mostly relies on either cheap games (~10 cent value game) or giveaways. Also all the groupee bundle and indiegala trash. (10cent value games)
Those games don't sell much on steam store.
Steam is the only winner here. Devs gain almost nothing from their game sales, and steam takes 90% of card trade.

its not question of affordability, its entirely possible, i just think less people would be happy with that choice. I guess i should have stressed out that i meant greenlight moderators and not regular indie publishing in the vein of GOG and ps4.
I just think that design is more effective in moderation of large crowds of people and valve is going that way.

But does the crowd want to be the moderator? That's the kicker. I don't think anyone here wants Steam to go "Big Brother" on us for game releases, but I don't think expecting some minimum standard of quality for their storefront is unreasonable.

But I feel like I'm repeating myself now. I guess as long as we keep throwing money at it, it doesn't really matter.

whats that
everyone tell me which product desrves to pass greenlight(black desert excluded for obvious reasons)
(http://i.imgur.com/MXLpIAT.png)

Of those? None, and the world would be a *better* place in my books. But that's just judging from the images, and that's not the point. Valve could, as a first step, demand a playable build before they allow you to use their infrastructure. And put a few people on the job who simply download it and run it once. If the game is an obvious asset swap, or someones first tries at Unity, kill it. If it has obvious bugs, like not being able to start the game, kill it.

Microsoft once tried the same, managing their marketplace thingy only by automated tools. Turns out that there's a lot of ugly people in the world, and even *your* game could be up there under someone else's flag. Of course they all signed a contract that they have the rights to publish the thing, but automated tools never sue. So the whole shop goes downhill quickly.

what is "asset swap", wheres the line, and what if someone first try at unity is decent.
that is straight up Fucked Up and Nazi because startup failure is not an obvious bug and may not be a bug at all

You are right, bugs are a thing that every player has to accept. Quality control is facism basically.

On the asset swap topic: that's indeed a difficult topic. You'd have to look carefully to distinguish pure asset swaps from the "Oh, but I can't afford to create assets, but I still want to be heard!" wannabes. With the latter to be included in the shop, I guess. Arguable. As a player I think there's nothing lost if you exclude these. As a developer I see the problems with this approach.

my main thought on this is that, if the fee is too low (100-200), it won't be any different than it is now. if the fee is too high (above 2k), it will simply force indies to use shady/scammy indie 'publishers' like black shell media and similar (which would pay the fee for all indies who ask, and in return, they'd take like 30% of the indie's profits. because most games on steam actually do make more than the fee, it would average out and they'd get easy money). the same "publishers" that get a game through greenlight in exchange for a percent of the profits or a hefty fee (and there are many such groups) will be the ones that pay the steam direct fee in exchange for a percentage of the profits

i expect the fee will be about 500, somewhere in the middle between those two possibilities

anyway i mostly agree with alec s.'s earlier post, about discoverability being the main problem, *not* too many games or asset flips (which i think are scapegoats). i do think discoverability is improving, but let me give an example of how it still has problems

if you go to my game, immortal defense, on steam (link in sig), you'll notice very few reviews, but a good review ratio. but scroll down a bit, and go to 'more like this', where it's supposed to recommend to people more games like my game. one thing to notice is that there are 12 games there, and only 1 of those 12 is a tower defense game. steam thinks games that aren't remotely similar are similar, because they share certain sets of tags, such as 'sci-fi', 'great soundtrack', and similar

now to me, someone who just finished playing an indie tower defense game, and is looking for more games like it, would probably be looking for other tower defense games -- not games that also just happen to be sci-fi and have a great soundtrack, because that could be anything

the same is true in reverse. my game is *not* in the 'more like this' section for most tower defense games. but it *is* in the 'more like this' section for random indie games that happen to be sci-fi or happen to have a great soundtrack tag or whatever. i've seen my game pop up in that section for a huge assortment of games that aren't like it, and never seen it pop up in that section for other tower defense games, even though my game does have the tower defense tag, all tags are treated equally in strength, including inane ones that aren't really relevant to why someone likes a game

i think the biggest thing steam could do to improve discoverability is to give different tags different 'strength' levels somehow; genres and subgenres would get the highest, and then other core gameplay tags such as whether a game is turn-based or real-time, and only then maybe motif tags like sci-fi or fantasy, and then all the other tags

otherwise you get the system saying that starcraft is more similar to asteroids than to warcraft, or that shadowrun returns is more similar to axiom verge than to jagged alliance

Help I can't decide whether to buy [shitty asset flip] or [actual decent game].  There's just too many games. I need some Quality Control!!!

the one that includes an exe or equivalent at least. there have been reports of green lit games you can pruchase that dont even include an exe file of all things.

It is more likely that some just put the exe into a wrong depot (Steam jargon for the folder where you place your content) by accident. That's how the player gets the wrong impression.

I think the problem is that the player cannot always tell what's an asset flip and what is not in advance, especially not if there are only few Steam reviews, which have to be taken with a grain of salt anyway. So the only sure way of knowing is to check out the game yourself, and that just takes time and money. So if you are looking out for good new games, you will miss more of them the more "low effort"-games there are in the store.

That's the difference to a store like Amazon. On Amazon you already know the product you are recommended, and you have at least some knowledge or trust in the company behind the product. For example if you are recommended a Nvidia Gpu, you already know it is a quality company and there are very likely some serious reviews for the particular product out there.

Yes, giving appropriate weights to the tags would be better. However, even when only the desired types of games are recommended, you still don't know if they are any good if you don't curate your market place. Or, there is a (probable) way of knowing if only popular games with very positive reviews are recommended. But then you will increase the probability that many good games don't get their spot to shine and remain relatively unnoticed, so the "rich get richer" problem kicks in. The conclusion is that the market place has to be curated by knowledgeable human beings to a defined extent in order to "make customers even more happy".

the idea of 'good' or 'bad' games is a myth really. there are reviews to see if other people liked it. there's demos. there's the refund policy

also i've seen people recommending steam hire people to curate, but they don't realize that that's what they used to do prior to greenlight, and those curators rejected almost all games that they personally didn't like (often based on genre or engine). la mulana and aquaria were both rejected by steam prior to greenlight as was my own game, and many others.

i think you may also not realize how time intensive it is. about 50 games are released on steam each day. if each of those is only played 5 hours to evaluate it, that's 250 hours you have to pay people to do each day. a full time team of 32 people, working 8 hours a day. 32 people times valve's yearly salary. that's millions and millions of dollars. just to get something that is often fails terribly. and that's just to play the games that get on steam. imagine playing the games that don't get on steam, it could double that easily.

besides, you realize that if steam did have curation, chances are they'd reject 'trap them', your steam game, immediately? just due to the bad graphics and seemingly simple idea, most people dismiss that game out of hand, including most valve employees. valve employees are not some special people, they don't have better taste than the average gamer. they often rejected a game (prior to greenlight) because it's not 3d, or whatever.

All it needs is an appropriate definition for the purpose of curation: low effort vs high effort, there is a line for minimal required effort that can be set by knowledgeable curators (that doesn't mean that only super polished award winning games get a pass, like Steam was in its early days).

Reviews are not very representative if there are only a handful of them. Demos and refund policy are all for the better, but you cannot account for one of the most valuable factors, and that is the customers limited time. In a sufficiently curated market place the customer will get less often disappointed and more often positively surprised with all the game choices he makes. The implication of that is that "the rich getting richer" principle will take less effect since the awareness of competent games will be more evenly distributed. All of that is probabilistic reality. It is only that Valve doesn't want to do the job, they want a magic space that can fly on its own without much involvement. In that case I also see Steam Direct as the next best option.  

That only shows that they didn't have a definition for the minimal quality bar. It can still be relatively low, but it will still filter out a lot of low-effort-games which get regularly greenlit.

Valve is a multi billion dollar company.

Curation shouldn't be about taste, you have to put your taste aside. For example, I am not a fan of Undertale but I wouldn't reject it just because it looks like an ugly rpg-maker game on the first glance. It is not hard to realize that there is effort behind this game, you realize the creator is serious about it. The same goes for Trap Them, you don't have to be a puzzle fan to realize there is serious effort behind its puzzle design (or if you don't see it then let it someone review who is more into puzzle games, that organization has to be a part of a competent curator team). Just by applying this common sense alone will make you quickly distinguish between serious attempts at making a game and scams or some toying around in an engine: a fool with a tool is still a fool.

+1
Common sense is all what is required to judge if a game is deemed to be on steam or not honestly. It isn't hard to notice if effort is put behind a game or not.

unless someone thinks that this kind of game has its place on steam (greenlit thanks to massive groupee bundle vote and giveaways) :
(http://i.imgur.com/oBiYxep.png)

Just as much as this one (also greenlit with massive help):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X95gD33Y20k

sweet jesus

Does it looks better than TrapThem Sniper Edition though?

but the question is: how does this game's existence negatively affect steam? it doesnt look like something most people would even pay attention to.

most of these arguments don't make sense to me. i mean sure "discoverability" is worse (getting on steam is not free marketing anymore). but like i said, for the majority of devs it's a net positive. and if you (the general "you") think your game would get past steam's hypothetical quality control just because you "worked hard" on it, i think that's bullshit. there are several games on steam i enjoy that would have in all likelihood been rejected by quality control.

either way, let's say steam introduces some "minimal" quality control and keeps the shittiest of shit games, such as the one above, out. nothing really changes. these are games almost no one really knows or cares about. if your game is at least decent, you're not competing with those games to begin with.

By taking away some of the collective attention space and lowering the trust of the customer in the games sold on the store:

In some future: just imagine a weeklong deals list with 10 pages of competent games vs a weeklong deals list with now 100 pages, including the same games plus 90 pages of engine-toy-arounds and scams, which can only only be recognized as such when you play them. Sure, better selling games will be filtered out to rise to the top but the customer will be more hesitant to check out new (or less known) games, because of the increased general suspicion.

As an analogy compare the two following super markets:
 
- super market 1: has no quality control
- super market 2: has quality control

Now you go out to buy some fruits in market 1. Now imagine 90% of fruits are rotten inside, but it is not always easy to spot on the first glance. But you know from your friends how to locate the 10% of the fruits which are in good condition. So yes, you have a way of getting good fruits, but would you overall trust market 1 and be happy with the store? Would you feel comfortable in trying out new products? Or would you rather prefer market 2, which has the same stuff you potentially may want but no rotten fruits? I think the answer is clear.

So sure, Steam's revenue increased as they opened the gates, but it increased because the overall selection of fruits increased, not because there are rotten fruits on the market. So their solution is still far from being optimal. And the main reason they get away with this is simply because there is no competition, no market 2 yet (Gog etc. might still be too selective and lacking other features).

i think the difference though is that a rotten fruit is actually harmful to your health. playing a bad game is actually *beneficial* to your knowledge of game design, because it teaches you what not to do, and is often beneficial in other ways (is funny / so bad that it's entertaining). the more bad games you play, the better of a person you are, whereas the more rotten fruit you eat, the worse your health gets

that's valid point for people who are also into game dev.but for a player it's different.
 I was looking for games in the sale section for three different categories: gore, horror, and anime . And i kept stumbling upon that game. because kids probably had fun tagging the trash game as a horror, gore and anime game. (Fortunately there's this thing to report the falsely tagged game.)
And at some point i just stopped looking for games because i couldn't trust the list. And i don't think it's a customer job to manually click "not interested" for a title to stop appearing in featured areas.

(a long time ago, i kept seeing Bubsy Two-Fur in the horror, post-apocalpytic category.) A valve official should be handling those stuff. it's funny to put bubsy in the horror category, but it isn't helpful for customers at all.)

Valve did a good job with the front store, as i stopped seeing low-quality games at all. but on the other side, i've never seen ஒழுக்கின்மை and J-Snake game anymore.

i think perhaps what would help with that would be better search options (which goes back to my better discoverability issue). for instance, the ability to exclude certain tags, the ability to exclude games with mixed or negative review ratios, and so on. perhaps even an ability to block particular games from appearing in your search results, so that once you see it once, and decide you don't want it, you can block the game from appearing again. something more like amazon, has, basically. amazon is the discoverability king when it comes to online stores

supermarket 1: AppStore
super market 2: GOG and Playstation

Fixed.

Ive only regretted 2 purchases on steam. For both it wasnt a problem to get a refund.

Also i agree with paul eres. what bakkusa is saying is more a result of bad search function than "too many games"

The fruit analogy doesnt really work either, because unlike fruit you can do a LOT of research on games (reviews, gameplay footage) to tell whether they are rotten/bad

Yes, a block feature would be great.

I doubt you can do a lot of research on rotten or less known games in general, plus it all would add up to more research time, and time of the player is a limiting factor. That is precisely the problem.

Also, it is well possible that people rarely regret their purchases. But it is an illusion to think that low-effort-games don't have an impact on their purchase decisions, in collective probability. It is because the "rich getting richer" principle takes effect, healthy and well known fruits are promoted on top, and that is all you are picking because you personally are already satisfied with the offered diversity. The "effective" diversity, however, is still limited because of the general suspicion that "the deeper you go", the more likely you will get a rotten fruit, thus you potentially miss all the diversity of good products resting next to the rotten fruits. So you get a selective streamlined view on the products in the market place, which actually doesn't reflect the real diversity of good products it has to offer. In short, you will only see the streamlined popular stuff.

Of course one could argue: But the selection is already broad enough, I get what I want, so where is the problem?
But then one could also say: May be, in a better store, it is easier to get something even better from time to time? So fair enough, no point in arguing on that level.

Note that my argument tries to take the whole picture of the process into account, not the personal reality/success story of a single individual. The number of Steam games is still relatively very small. In some future there can be millions of games.

still, again, what makes you think steam is better at determining whether you'll like a game than you are? taste is subjective. steam could reject a game you like, or allow a game you would have rejected. to think that everyone would obviously reject the same games is silly, different people have different tastes. i would have allowed that klabi mentioned earlier for instance, but i would have not allowed games like 'bloody boobs' which seem to just be "games" that trick the player into buying them through looking like porn but not actually having much substance in the game: http://store.steampowered.com/app/545250/ -- but obviously from it having some positive reviews, some people would enjoy that thing even though i can't imagine how anyone could like it

I already mentioned that curation is not about taste, but mainly about common sense: looking whether the game is functional/doesn't crash etc., and checking its gameplay and content to distinguish it from engine-toy-arounds. Of course there will be some borderline decisions but in doubt you can just give the game a pass and you will still filter out the majority of rotten fruits. It's silly to assume that it cannot be done to a beneficial extent. It is like saying "there is no common metric, everything can be good, so why bother with quality control". May be there are few individuals who actually have a fetish for rotten fruits, so we will offer them in our supermarket - same argument.  

If that's the case, perhaps a better Steam curators functionality would be in line? Right now, I don't really see the point: they give you like two sentences to justify their recommendation that may provide thinking material but lacks meat. Give curators more tools. Then if Steam really wants to go hands-off, set up a system by which customers can tailor the storefront based on curators they trust and identify with. A group of people can come together and share recommendations and opinions with people of similar tastes. Yeah, you probably won't agree with them all the time, but that's normal and you could still have a secondary part of the front page for "no-holds-barred" advertising. Could be better than Steam trying to do it from a smaller sample size (read: a single customer.)

What about this one?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/531070

has 100% negative reviews lol

ok, now im convinced, dispatch a cleanup team

just noticed that i need a filter for games that cost more than 5$ (more than 8&  would be more adequate) as the section of games under 10$ is overflooded by 1$ low quality games.

Yep. "Race to the bottom", plague of mobile phone stores already.

if it's just a bare minimum type thing, then that klabi game would probably meet that bare minimum right? i mean it does look like babby's first game maker game, but it's still arguably meeting a bare minimum: it is a game, it's not buggy, it works, etc.

How do you know it works, isn't buggy, and is a serious effort at making a game? Have you played it? If the trailer isn't indication enough you can distinguish between immature and mature intentions at making a game when you play it. When you are still undecided after playing, just give it a pass and you will still have a significantly better curated system. Just note that the metric "taste" and "low quality games are good to study for devs" have no place in a curation process intended to provide diverse quality content for its players.

because the reviews aren't universally negative, that's how -- it has mixed reviews, many positive, many negative. that shows some percent of people enjoyed it. if even 10% of people enjoy a game of those who buy it, it's worth being on steam.

That only shows that you shouldn't trust them, it is a perfect example for just that. Just take a look at the positive reviews and get flooded with sarcasm and trading cards mentions. Btw. I can already see by the trailer that its developer is mechanically incompetent, it displays noobish collision bugs. And getting mechanics right is fundamentally important for a platformer.

Steam reviews are garbage but they usually tell you whether a game has serious technical issues, is an abandoned early access title and STUFF LIKE THAT. that's pretty much their only real purpose.

if noobish collision bugs weren't allowed than 99% of the platformers the angry videogame nerd reviews would never have been officially licensed by nintendo for release

You sure are making a big stretch here.

Btw. these are the positive Klabi reviews in a nutshell:

- "my cancer got cancer and died"

- "Gave it the "Why is this on steam?" award. 10/10"

- "cards"

actually, the games that generally get voted in with the greenlight voting groups tend to also spam up the  store vote for the first few days by giving keys to the group for review, the whole thing is basically set up to get through greenlight and scam as many people as possible for the first few days while it still shows positive or neutral on the front page of new releases.  That's probably why there's some positive reviews, they tend to start with a few.  Unfortunately the refund system is pretty hidden still and most people don't know about it, so generally at least a few $100 worth stays sold and unrefunded.  The accounts that are in these greenlight voting groups also if you look tend to release a few games a month to a few games a WEEK, taking advantage of people not really knowing how useless the voting system really is (your generic game purchaser on steam won't be too aware of this). Honestly I don't even think the way steam is going is going to help as much as they think, the greenlight volume on steam really isn't THAT huge, and hell, the groups doing this aren't exactly hiding, you can click on groups on the side of half the game submissions and easily find that they're greenlight spamming groups. If steam cracked down on these groups and removed greenlight access from all the accounts in them that would solve 90% of the problem at once.  There's a few russian ones I've seen too that actually boast about guaranteeing greenlight if you publish through them,

Valve actually addressed this problem in 2015, with devs essentially trading keys and cross voting in groups, they just didn't do anything to stop it.

key reviews don't actually count toward the average; i was counting the average, which was only people who bought it on steam. even among people who bought it there are a bunch of positive reviews, and some are genuine -- though sure, some are satire. but i'm not sure if that matters anyway -- if you sarcastically like something, you still like it. think of the people who buy and enjoy movies like troll 2 or manos hand of fate. if you "ironically" like something because it's so bad it's good, you still do in fact like it.

they key review not counting toward the average is relatively new , it started around september 2016.

if only valve decided to create a system that removes voting and key-spam-boosters.

I doubt that people who genuinely enjoys the "so bad it's good genre " intentionely voted for klabi to be on the steam store.
Those games are just sold for pennies (during sales) , and customer is getting back his money by selling the cards. (lowest card cost is usually around 10 cent, you get at least 3 cards per game)
That's just a rigged system. you buy a 10cent game, you get 1 more game to your game list (number of games badge), eligibility for booster packs, cards.

Unless you're naive, i don't understand how you're giving the benefit of doubt to games like those.

i'm anything if not naive; i've been making indie games for nearly 25 years, and reviewing them for nearly 15. i've reviewed probably hundreds of games worse than anything that's on greenlight now, in my years running the 'ohrrpgce' engine magazine. i feel like a lot of you don't realize just how bad a bad game can get. klabi isn't particularly bad, it's just normal bad. i've seen much worse bad than that. at least klabi runs, doesn't crash on start or crash in the first level, doesn't delete files on your hard drive, at least it has music and sound effects (many of the indie games i've reviewed didn't even bother with those). i'd definitely enjoy that game over many other games.

there are certainly people who buy it for the cards, but again, a sarcastic positive review is still a positive review. they aren't just pretending to like it for the sake of review, they enjoyed it in a so bad it's good sense. i feel like a lot of the people criticizing klabi are just jealous of its success, but it succeeded by fulfilling a small niche of game (meme/joke games, games that are so bad they're good) well. instead of criticizing klabi and talking about how it doesn't actually deserve the money it gets, you should be focusing on improving your own games so that they could enjoy similar success to klabi's.

and by improving, i don't mean simply making a game "good" from a pure theoretical or gameplay perspective, the way j-snake often thinks of it. i mean making a game "appealing" to an audience. enticing. a game that they look at and want to buy. that is more important than how structurally or mechanically good a game is. it's sometimes known as youtube appeal -- a game that is interesting enough to stream or to put in a youtube video, a game that's as fun to watch as it is to play. many games are fun to play, but not fun to watch (such as trap them). and a game needs to be both fun to play *and* fun to watch to be successful. klabi just shows the extreme of a game that's fun to watch but not fun to play, and which still succeeds despite that handicap.

example, people like to make videos of this game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3UpfY-JzEs

you can find dozens of those. how many fan videos like that can you find for trap them? or even for my own game, immortal defense? not too many.

i'm talking from a player/customer point of view, not a developer point of view. I understand where you come from.
You're just being a lot more tolerant towards indie games because you know how hard it is to make a complete competent game, and from your experience you've played a lot of games that are worse than this one.
But that doesn't justify a product of this quality to be present in a big store like steam.

Your argument is basically saying, "this is ok because i've seen worse". when it shouldn't be ok.
0,1 hour of gameplay which is a requirement to post a review for a game. So people are enjoying running a game for 10 min for the sole purpose to make a meme sarcastic joke?
you're justifying this because some people are enjoying paying 10 cent to make a sarcastic positive review?

The videos you're talking about aren't "fan" videos, it's just controversial because a game that ugly is on steam.
Youtubers would do anything to get more views... that's naivete if you think they are fan videos.

I clicked ahead randomly in the video and,

Propably for the first time ever I side with J-Snake: time is an issue. It's not like "nothing is lost on a bad game" - yes, you can refund it, you can give it a bad vote, but you'll never get your time back. I have a fulltime job and a child now, I get one hour of computer time per day, if all planets align nicely. I want them to stop wasting my time..

And if that means that some enthusiastic My First Unity Game developer got the cut, too, so be it.

The comparision to GooglePlay or the AppStore comes to mind - I never ever actually used the shop, except to download a game somebody else told me about. There's only so much that Discoverability can actually do when the material it draws from is so overwhelmingly excrementary.

Another point worth bringing up:

Just because you give someone the ability to choose ("they can decide for themselves whether a game is crap or not") doesn't mean that you are building healthy trust with the customer. When Steam starts wasting people's time with "garbage" they have no interest in, you not only risk them becoming leery of Steam itself but the developers on it. Rotten fruit or not, what you allow yourself to serve to the customer says a lot about what you think is valuable or good for them. By Steam taking a "no-holds-barred" approach, they're essentially saying ANY game is good enough for Steam, so long as the developer pays a fee (which has little to no bearing on game quality at all.) This hurts the developer too, as their potential consumer base has become jaded to anything that isn't mainstream.

Again, the only reason Steam gets away with it is their monopoly. People put up with all the garbage laying around because they don't have any other option for getting the good stuff, but that doesn't necessarily stop them from being suspicious about their storefront's (and, unfortunately, their providers') standards.

This issue goes far beyond whether or not people can make intelligent decisions about their game purchases. It also has to do with the trust between customer and provider.

It's better than it used to be
https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse/?appid=765&browsesort=trend&section=items&actualsort=mostrecent&p=1

I see only three crafting survival horror action assetflip games on the first page. That's only 10% :D

Of course, it's still filled with other kinds of crap and "i don't know what I'm doing" games. I even saw one that just plain stole a song from Beastie Boys for the trailer.

But honestly, is it such a big problem? Yes, it's a boiling pot for kids who rush head-on into game publishing with just a few weeks of work, but that's how you start doing it. Have you never been 15 years old?

you're talking about a different thing here. you're linking to the greenlight page, not the steam releases page. generally the games on greenlight are *supposed* to look more amateur than the games on steam, because a lot of them never get finished or released or don't pass the voting process. this thread was about the games for sale themselves on steam are bad, not whether the games on greenlight are bad. you should be linking to or looking at the actual new releases list:

http://store.steampowered.com/explore/new/

of course you could say that once steam direct is in place, there'd be no voting barrier and most of those games would be for sale. that actually isn't the case. did you know that only 1/3 of the games that got greenlit were ever actually released on steam? it turns out actually finishing a game is a lot harder than presenting one for votes. that alone is a filter: bad game developers tend not to even be able to finish a game (if i had to guess, i'd say most people in this thread have started, but not finished, a game -- that's fairly typical on indie game forums). even the worst bad game, if it's finished, is usually better than an unfinished game.

About all of this, have we started to see some numbers on the effects of Steam's discovery update? It was supposed to help discovery of games on the platform, its been out for a couple months now. Discovery is the real underlying problem behind a lot of the issues people are talking about here I think. I heard some enthusiastic comments early back in January, but we probably have more numbers to look at by now. Anyone here with a some games out noticed an uptick in the last few months?

steam did actually release an analysis of it, but privately, for steam developers only. so i can't really talk about it, might be against the TOS to do so. if you are a steam developer though, look at the steam development forums, and there's an announcement there about it and a stickied thread.

as for how it affected my own game, can't say i noticed any difference. my own game isn't a huge seller, so it seems silly to base it on any one individual game though.

edit: you do seem to have a game that was greenlit. so you should be able to see it there.

http://www.whatsonsteam.com/index.htm (http://www.whatsonsteam.com/index.htm)

I heard in the Rifter's thread:

Steam Reviews huh

more like uh

Steam Meanlight  :handpencil: ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9McGKrxOnB8

One of those art school kids only capable of making visual novels about how sad they are should make a game capturing the experience of following a promising greenlight game for months only to have the updates just abruptly stop with no notice.

Making games is hard, I bet!

videogames are back
but for how long

Videogames, 2017

wow i acutally like this. rakuen seems interestiig

I messaged squiddi from http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=3 (http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=3) about http://store.steampowered.com/app/597700/OVIVO/ (http://store.steampowered.com/app/597700/OVIVO/). It's the next version of http://armorgames.com/play/1846/shift-3 (http://armorgames.com/play/1846/shift-3)

so its $100 after all.
http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1265921510652460726
many actual developers ive seen voiced 500 as the reasonable one, but it seems community of poopy stained diaper wearing babbys convinced valve otherwise. I wonder if Lord Gaben also gonna lick his peepee and post pictures like they say.
curators are useless trash, dont know why they put emphasis on it, maybe to appease some reviewer people ego.
no word on content control, thats the most important part. Can stolen copyrighted stuff, rootkits or stuff like Tranny Gladiator pass? Thats arguably the most important part.

is there a term for when a cemented monopoly position allows a company to repeatedly do things incompetently?

Capitalism?

if they use visibility as deciding factor, then its basically becomes a mobile store. More clones with confusing names and traffic buying on PC if its the case.
Would recommend you setup your bot traffic factory right now to get into the bubble.

it's not really incompetent, right? It's just deeply destructive over the long term. But if valve continues making capital now they don't really have to care.

I dont understand the point of curators. If you care what [famous youtube personality] thinks of a game, you're probably already subscribed to their youtube channel anyway. Other than that the curators are mostly meme/joke stuff.

Which is a shame.

Similar to Curators I'd like to see "Developer Favorites" or "Developers this Developer is Following" like how https://paom.com/designer/smestorp/following (https://paom.com/designer/smestorp/following) does it.

Back on the topic of Curators though, that sucks. Because I think there's room for personalities to develop around specific genres eghttps://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepodcast/24570/20-minutes-filler-podcast (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepodcast/24570/20-minutes-filler-podcast) they review "quick boardgames in portable boxes" - every episode they discuss at least 1 of those or interview one of their creators. I'm interested in this genre and listen to their podcast.

You could have the same thing for say, 2D metroidvanias, or artsy puzzle games, etc. But since there are tons of 2D metroidvanias made every day (thanks forums.tigsource.com), a curator who wades through the crap could be helpful for a fan.

or people can just be normal and not have a need for someone telling them what to buy and a store to buy it all centralized to one service

It's hard to fight convenience. Just about everyone's on Steam because just about everyone's on steam :/

So what game should I buy next?

Hollow Knight.

Mighty Number 7

Viktor, a Steampunk Adventure :D